Jeff Wall
 |
| Jeff Wall, Steve's Farm, Steveston 1991 |
A grit road passes, undulating, through an unremarkable
town. In the middle distance, someone walks unhurriedly towards us along one of
the light grey tyre tracks. We notice
two horses, on a patch of ground behind
dilapidated wooden buildings. Around
these gently animated figures the stillness gathers. This is a place waiting
for something to happen. The road, the tyre tracks, stand as traces of purpose.
Beyond the sheds and the huddled houses we sense infinities of space.
In the stillness, we notice: a loose portico, about to slide
to the ground; rusting vehicles; scrubby brown grass on a shallow embankment
and field. Behind the crumbling houses there’s a pile of timber for burning (a
gutted outbuilding?). Echoing this, fallen tree branches lie opposite. Above,
the blue is draining out of a still, even sky. In the background, where the
road swerves to the right in the distance and disappears, a row of identical
houses leads us to the picture’s edge. We
look again and we notice that the road is more of a track, encroached on by
wild grass; the field is becoming a wilderness; indifferent trees sway
slightly, under a dying sky. It’s a frontier place, a threshold between human
dwelling and ragged nature. It’s also a transparency, over a lighted box, and
it’s entrancingly beautiful.
I am in Tate Modern, looking at Jeff Wall’s Steve’s Farm, Steveston (1980). I’ve seen it before, at a small exhibition in
Norwich Castle two years ago, and coming back to
it I remember the details: those horses, the holes in the roof, that spindly
tree near the corner of the field. I don’t think it’s just chance that those
things have stayed in my mind, though chance is always an essential element in
what we take away with us from exhibitions. But details - in art, in life -
become truly memorable when they belong to a powerful atmosphere. And Steve’s Farm is typical of Wall’s
pictures in that it does impress on your mind a really strong, strange feeling.
His pictures don’t hit you, sensation-like. Instead, they seep into you as keep
looking at them. They are a slow-burn emotional experience. Though they are
made in the ‘instant’ medium of photography, the slow kind of looking they
induce is anything but instantaneous. You look, you register, you take your
time.
What is the atmosphere of Steve’s Farm? I would say it’s melancholy. Not operatic, tragic grief,
but the sadness of a ruined farm and of identical houses, each as solitary as a
Carthusian cell, surrounded by lone and level straggly land. A sadness of wonky
fences and clapped out cars, of living on the edge of nowhere. It’s the
melancholy so wound into the fabric of life you don’t even notice it, except
when you’re still, except when you stand just outside it for a moment, as we do
now. The subjects are neither diminished nor aggrandised by the contrivances of
art. They return us to the stuff of life, simply more disposed, for a while, to
see it.
The stuff of experience, however terrible the experience, is
still just ordinary stuff. Photography,
the recording art, is a wonderful medium for reminding us of this. But ordinary
things have one peculiar quality: namely, they don’t exist. Or rather, things
are only ordinary when they are on the margins of vision, as this town must
have been ordinary to the driver who passed through it, an hour ago, a day ago.
Things stop being ordinary when you start looking at them. Take the most
everyday, dull thing you can think of and start drawing it, and it becomes the
most interesting thing in the world. As we look at it, we feel that it is an
important matter to capture its form, its texture, its presence.
And this gazing on the ordinary is what much of Wall’s art
is about. His suburban images, based in his home town of Vancouver, become as fascinating as Chardin’s
pots and hares. Many of his photos
remark on what usually goes unremarked, they describe the nondescript. They remind me of David Lynch’s filming
technique of shooting scenes from one fixed point, turning a sideways glimpse
into a frontal gaze. This attentiveness to things is analogous to the moral act
of giving your attention to another, of looking sympathetically beyond
yourself, but it is not in itself moral, or morally improving. It is also
paradoxical, as the looking itself involves some kind of organisation, as we assimilate
the scene before us: the immediate impression turns into a mediated, meaningful
vision. Another way of looking at Wall’s photos is to see them as a meditation
on the processing we do as we sort the world into ordered images.
Central to the ordered, artful image are genre and composition.
We look again at Steve’s Farm, and we
notice that it is a certain kind of
picture, a landscape. And it does the things that landscapes in the classical
tradition tend to do: it disposes its parts into a harmonious, balanced whole. It
makes us think of Dutch pastoral, say, or the classical world of Poussin. As in
the old masters, the skyline in this picture divides the picture into a ratio
which looks close to the Golden Mean. Like any number of seventeenth-century
pictures, the road is a device to lead us from foreground to middleground and
background. It also balances the strong horizontal of the houses, which is further
counterpointed by the orthogonals: the wooden border and the water channel on
the left, and the line of grass and fence on the right. While the diagonals lead
us towards the vanishing point, the foreground is anchored by the shed, fence
and tree on the bottom left. This helps to pull our attention back to inspect
this waste ground. Land is connected to sky by the treetops. Most prominently,
there is one tree centre left, one central and one on the right, each at a
different depth in the pictorial field: they articulate these receding spatial
planes, and also divide the landscape into four coherent vertical sections,
making it more legible. There is a rough symmetry between the land on either
side of the road, made more visually stimulating by having the road off-centre,
and by the varied levels of ground. The rhythm of the wooden posts on the left
is answered by the pattern of house shapes in the distance.
These devices of geometrical composition work with colour
harmony: the image is unified by dominant tones of grey-blue (the road, the
fence, the sky, the slate roofs), and green-brown. This is fitfully punctuated
by the white and creamy house fronts, illuminated from the right. By such
means, every part of the picture leads our eye easily to another. Good
composition always draws us back into a picture, creating a satisfyingly
regulated world which we instinctively don’t want to leave.
In the classical tradition, the harmonics of composition
signify a harmonic, ordered society. The equilibrium of the image is a formal
equivalent of the equitable cosmos. The Dutch landscape or interior is characteristically
about the prosperity that follows good government, in the well-ordered soul and
the well-ordered society. Wall’s images evoke this tradition, so we can see how
his subject-matter overturns the usual repertoire of images. Prosperity has
turned to shabbiness – uncultivated land, a defunct farm. A thriving society
has become a desolate, unsocial world, where life is lived in isolation. This
is the end of a story, an anti-pastoral where man’s enterprise is sinking back
into stark, unbeautified nature. Thus the composition is not merely a technical
device, but a way of making the image an ironic commentary on a whole tradition.
At the same time, composition also balances, but does not resolve, the various
tensions – between man and nature, between the old (the farm) and the new (the
houses in the distance), between movement and stillness. And between the smart,
weightless technology of the work and the drab, solid poverty of the thing
represented.
To take another example: Milk
(1984) is deliberately, one might say
ostentatiously, composed: the bush balances the figure of the man, and this left
column of the picture adds visual interest to the whole scene: it creates a further space in the receding banister and
staircase, and its verticals answer the tilted horizontal of the pavement. It’s
unrelated in terms of narrative to the man, but cover it up with your hand and
the picture loses much of its power. The variety of textures creates a visual
interest: glass is placed against brick;
there is a syncopation of different rhythms of brickwork; the plant becomes an
intriguing remnant of organic life, enveloped
by the mundane and the manmade. Like Steve’s
Farm, Milk also alludes to
paintings: the man, modelled in strong chiaroscuro, could easily belong in a
painting by Caravaggio. He’s the stark obverse of Murillo’s
cherubic streetkids.
But what is happening here? What has prompted this man to
jolt the carton of milk and send its contents flying? We do not know. The more
we look at these pictures, the more questions they raise. They lead us from the
seen to the unseen. Techniques of absolute clarity are used to create an
awareness of mystery. The work also directs us to think about the medium. Photography
is an art based on light. In Wall’s work, light is fundamental in other ways:
these images are transparencies, they are in light boxes, each one is a
revelation of some kind. Yet what they reveal points to the unrevealed, to what
is not transparent – the secret lives
in suburban houses, the tragedies that happen on a street corner, and pass in
an instant. Illumination
is effective because it points us to the shadows.
This sense of mystery is also bound up with a feeling of
wonder. Part of the fascination in Jeff Wall’s work is the complexity of the
process. Images like Milk might be
inspired by something happening on a street, which is then painstakingly
recreated using actors, in dozens of separate shots. Others, like A Sudden Gust of Wind (based on an image by Hokusai) or Dead Troops Talk, are studio fabrications.
No such scene ever took place in the world out there: they exist only as art.
These last two works cited have been digitally assembled to create an entirely
new image. Sometimes this process of meticulous construction can take months. It
is a kind of inversion of Gerhard Richter’s paintings of photos, or Ron Mueck’s
sculptures. For while those artists use hyper-realist techniques to bring painting
and sculpture close to the condition of photography, Jeff Wall takes
photography in the direction of the crafting, fabricating process of the
painting and sculpture workshop. In each case, we feel intrigued, and the
sensation of some marvellous skill, beyond our comprehension, is part of the
viewing experience.
Jeff Wall’s photos are utterly clear, easily readable
images. And yet they involve us deeply by prompting complex responses. We can
read them according to a classical language, and see them as a kind of
deconstruction of that language. We can explore their ambience of mystery,
imagining the narrative around them, consciously sensing the dislocating,
rather eerie feelings that drift through us as they unfold their strangeness. We
can relate sympathetically to the pathos of the subject matter, and then interpret
them as post-modern explorations of artifice and the impossibility of pinning
down the authentic. And we can be rapt by a fascination with the means of their
production. Above all, they are such intensely, radiantly beautiful creations
that they seem to offer some kind of transcendence, transposing the mass of
reality into the ethereal world of the lighted box and the thin film of
transparency. These glowing creations suggest stained glass, a juncture between
earthly and perfect light. Reverently attentive to the texture of the real,
Jeff Wall’s photography is finally a visionary art.
How to See the World is an introduction to the new academic discipline of the study of visual culture. Visual artefacts in the form of fine and decorative arts have been studied in universities for about a century, of course, and before that in salons and art academies. What makes 'visual culture' as a field a new departure is its focus on mass and popular imagery, which now has an unimaginable range and volume in the age of digital media. How to See the World takes us through some of the perspectives this new analysis can take. 'How to See Yourself' takes us fairly speedily from classical portraiture to modern artists such as Cindy Sherman and the ubiquitous selfie. The emphasis here is on how the self is radically unstable, and a matter of performance rather than essence, in tension with traditional social categories. ''How We think about Seeing' is an update on brain science and what it tells us about perception and processing of visual information; we see with our bodies, not simply the retina. Further chapters look at the story of mapping for military purposes from the nineteenth century to the contemporary drone; early film and its conjunction with industrialisation and the train; the rise of the modern megacity; the changing climate; and mass political protest. All of these areas of life have generated, exploited and explored the expressive and interpretive capacities of visual culture. To orient oneself in the modern world, we need to develop skills in reading images from street art to museum-housed installations to instagram snaps and video clips circulated as memes. To be active participants in our own culture, we need to be adept at using these visual codes ourselves.